Just another Monday morning

Got out of bed on totally the wrong side this morning. Yesterday’s sunny afternoon on Bute, spent skimming stones and big bits of ice across a frozen reservoir to hear the strange noises seemed a million miles away by the time I’d finished swearing at the tangled laces on my trainers and sprayed my black top with toothpaste as I rushed to get out the door. Further fuelled by raging hormones, and an overdose of Chopin on the train to work, I was veering wildly between wanting to kill someone one minute and lying down on the pavement weeping the next. The sight of an unfortunate pigeon in full rigor mortis, lying on its back with feet in the air outside Greggs the Bakers, seemed somehow appropriate for the day. Fortunately for the students, I had plenty of admin to do, so they got the benefit of my two lovely colleagues instead of the torn-faced old sow with the demeanour of a wasp in a jam jar and a hairdo that looks like a burst sofa.

Lunch with the visiting external examiners in the dread venue of the pub did nothing to improve my foul mood. The noise from the braying group of men on their third pint at the next table drowned out everything going on at our table, so I decided to cease my polite nodding and vacant smiling as a silent protest against…against…I racked my brains to identify an aggressor then gave up…well it doesn’t matter what it’s against when you’re in an inexplicably bad mood.

Fittingly, as with all of my protests, it went completely unnoticed, but at least the examiners would have wondered who the mute with a hearing aid accidentally caught up in a stray bit of her bonkers hairdo at lunchtime was.